[no subject]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my queries about those D and D&G
quotations.

 I will look over again in detail the Hegel/Leibniz stuff in DR -but
skimming over it briefly it does seem precisely that which I was looking
for. My interest in this latter point was sparked by  recently re-
reading Althusser's essay on 'Contradiction and Overdetermination' (in
For Marx). I'm working on D&G and Marx, and feel that Althusser was
going somewhere important with his notion of overedetermination, despite
being somewhat unsatisfying in his formulation. D's work in DR on
'making the inessential essential' seems to have strong resonances with
overdetermination -and takes the whole discussion much further than
Althusser was able, towards a theory of multiplicities (which seems to
me the necessary correlate for a thinking of overdetermination as
opposed to contradiction, see DR p311). It also seems to me to be the
route to re-activating Marx in a manner which would side-step much of
D&G and Fouault's critique of Marxism (see, for example p211 of Foucault
Live on an 'overdetermined' conception of politics). Althusser's essay
is less interesting as a critique of Hegel, than as a critique of
marxism generally -both in its hegelian and other forms. It also seems
to me that all this would anable a re-thinking of a Marx ontology (again
s.thing Althusser was attempting in Reading Capital) -hence my interest
in 'before Being there is politics'.

"Whether discursive or not, formations, families and multiplicites are
historical. They are not just compounds built up from their co-existence
but are inseperable from 'temporal reactors of derivation'; and when a
new formation appears, with new rules and series, it never comes all at
once, in a single phrase or act of creation, but emerges like a series
of 'building blocks', with gaps, traces and recativations of former
elements that survive under the new rules [e.g. see the stuff on
'survivals' in For marx also for this last point]." (Foucault, by D,
p21-2)  

Anyway -that on the genesis of the questions.

Thanks again
-- 
M